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The History of Attachment Theory
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Attachment – History, Models and Culture
In this course, Professor Jeremy Holmes explores attachment theory. In the first lecture, we review its history. In the second lecture, we think about how attachment theory and modern evolutionary theory are linked, highlighting key figures in its development, such as Viktor Frankl and Phillip Shaver. In the third lecture, we think about how attachment has been measured, including Mary Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’ and Mary Main’s ‘Adult Attachment Interview’. Next, we focus on the role of caregiver sensitivity in attachment, reviewing the Grossman model of parental attachment roles. In the fifth lecture, we introduce language, considering the role it plays in attachment through the lens of Grice’s principles of effective communication. In the sixth and final lecture, we explore attachment theory across different cultures, addressing the field’s historical focus on WEIRD participants, and Margaret Mead’s challenge to John Bowlby’s founding theories.
The History of Attachment Theory
In this lecture, we think about the history of attachment theory, focusing in particular on: (i) John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth as founding figures; (ii) the importance of ethology and the role of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen in enlightening psychology to a new, non-laboratory based way of studying human attachment; (iii) Harry Harlow’s research on monkey surrogate ‘mothers’, signposted as a key influence on Bowlby’s attachment dynamic theory; (iv) Shafer and Emerson’s stages of attachment, focusing on some of the modern theory which challenges aspects of its structure.
I'm Jeremy Holmes.
00:00:05I'm a psychiatrist and psychotherapist and professor at X two University,
00:00:06And I'm going to be talking about attachment today. Um,
00:00:12I'm particularly going to start with a review of a little bit about the
00:00:16history of attachment because I think we
00:00:21need to contextualise where attachment came from.
00:00:22So let's start. Most people associate attachment in their minds with John Bowlby.
00:00:27But in fact,
00:00:32there are two people who created attachment theory and an attachment research.
00:00:33A man and a woman, a psychiatrist and a psychologist
00:00:38and a kind of theoretician and a researcher.
00:00:43So John Bowlby was the psychiatrist child psychiatrist.
00:00:46He was a great thinker and theory builder. Mary Ainsworth, his colleague,
00:00:51came from psychology and from experimental psychology
00:00:57and the huge body of research in attachment theory that you will be familiar with,
00:01:00mostly developed in the United States came from Mary Ainsworth herself,
00:01:08her PhD students and her PhD students students.
00:01:13So we've got this kind of marriage, if you like,
00:01:16between psychology and psychiatry between a man and woman between the US and the UK
00:01:19and that's attachment theory.
00:01:24Now, how did it all start? What it did all start with John Bowlby.
00:01:27John Bowlby was a psychoanalyst, trained the psychoanalyst.
00:01:31He therefore was interested in relationships
00:01:36and how relationships can be used to help people with psychological difficulties.
00:01:41But he was very dissatisfied with the intellectual status of psychoanalysis
00:01:47and felt that it was rather inward looking.
00:01:53And
00:01:57this we're now talking about the late 19 forties, the early 19 fifties.
00:01:59A new science had just come into being around that time,
00:02:04and that was the science of mythology
00:02:08and mythology is associated, particularly with to kind of founding fathers, Um uh,
00:02:10nicotine Bergen and Conrad Llorens
00:02:16and their approach. And this new science was saying,
00:02:20Let's not study animal behaviour in the laboratory.
00:02:25Let's not, if you like, study, uh, rats in mazes.
00:02:29Let's study animals in their natural environment.
00:02:34Let's go out into the fields and rivers and look at how animals behave.
00:02:37And that's
00:02:42had a huge impact on John Bowlby because he
00:02:44realised that we could study human behaviour in the same
00:02:47way and in particular,
00:02:51the behaviour of
00:02:52infants and small Children in relation to their parents.
00:02:54Another hugely influential figure in the early
00:02:59stages of attachment theory was Harry Harlow.
00:03:02Harry Harlow was American researcher who was interested in monkey behaviour
00:03:06and one of his most famous studies, took a group of monkeys
00:03:13and offered them a choice.
00:03:18And the choice was between
00:03:20a wire figure with a bottle of milk on it
00:03:22and a figure that was covered with a nice, warm, uh, material,
00:03:27which the little monkeys could cuddle up to.
00:03:33So these little monkeys were offered
00:03:35surrogate mothers, if you like one that was just going to feed them
00:03:38and one that would be comfortable and would
00:03:41provide warmth and a kind of responsiveness.
00:03:44And the interesting finding there was that these baby monkeys
00:03:47preferred the warm, cuddly mother to the one that simply fed them,
00:03:52and that was a hugely influential in bulbs thinking.
00:03:57And he therefore developed this idea of what he called the attachment dynamic.
00:04:01And the attachment dynamic essentially says that
00:04:06we are biologically programmed through our evolutionary
00:04:10history to seek out a an older,
00:04:14wiser figure when we, as infants and small Children experience threat,
00:04:18illness or exhaustion.
00:04:25And he saw this
00:04:28in evolutionary terms.
00:04:29He visualised the origins of man 200,000 years ago on the old biplane,
00:04:31which is now Ethiopia and Kenya
00:04:37and he saw that human
00:04:40infants and human beings generally
00:04:41were very as compared with the predators. They were surrounded by
00:04:44disadvantage. We can't run very fast. We haven't got very sharp teeth or claws.
00:04:49What have we got? We've got to
00:04:54essential features.
00:04:56And those features are our big brains and our, uh, intellectual capacities.
00:04:58And we've got each other where Social species.
00:05:04Now the problem with the big brain is that
00:05:07to get that big brain through the birth canal,
00:05:10human beings have to be born in a state of extreme immaturity.
00:05:13If you think about a baby lamb, um,
00:05:17springtime that lamb is up and running and skipping within
00:05:20a few half an hour of birth.
00:05:26If you think of the human infant, it takes us a whole year to learn minimum,
00:05:29to learn to walk.
00:05:34So were born in the state of extreme immaturity,
00:05:35and we are therefore hugely vulnerable to predation.
00:05:38If you think about this environment of
00:05:42early adaptation that Bowlby and his colleague
00:05:44Robert Hind another very important figure in
00:05:48the early history of attachment theory,
00:05:50started to think about
00:05:53and they realised that as evolution shapes not just
00:05:55our physical appearance But it also shapes our brains,
00:05:59and it shapes our social behaviours
00:06:03and those infants that are so vulnerable to predation
00:06:05if they have an attachment dynamic.
00:06:10If they can trigger, um,
00:06:13protection from their caregivers when they're in the states of threat,
00:06:15then they will be safe from predation.
00:06:21We can think about this.
00:06:24At least I like to think about this is rather like the human immune system.
00:06:25It's a safety system, were beset with
00:06:29danger in the environment and particularly
00:06:32in this environment of evolutionary adaptation,
00:06:35were beset by danger and in order to protect ourselves against danger,
00:06:37we need defence mechanisms.
00:06:41The immune system protects us from bacteria and
00:06:43viruses highly relevant in our current environment,
00:06:46and the attachment dynamic protects us in this
00:06:50social context that I've been talking about.
00:06:53I just wanted to mention towards the end of this section, uh,
00:06:58an important early study of infants, which was hugely influenced by Bobi.
00:07:02And that was Schaefer and Ericsson,
00:07:08and they developed what they call the stages of attachment.
00:07:11And this was all based on a paper that was published
00:07:14in the early seventies, early sixties 1964. I think the paper came out
00:07:17and they said, If you just look at these infants,
00:07:22these hugely vulnerable infants from birth to a
00:07:25stage where they are able to begin to,
00:07:31uh, be somewhat independent,
00:07:34there are four stages of relationship, and these four stages are number one.
00:07:37What Schaffer called the a social stage number two what
00:07:42they're called the indiscriminate or non specific stage of attachment.
00:07:48Um, number three is the specific stage of attachment.
00:07:53A number four was what they call the multiple stage of attachment.
00:07:56So what were they talking about here, where they studied infants in relation,
00:07:59observed infants in relation to their mothers in
00:08:04the way that I was talking about earlier,
00:08:07influenced by the theology and the theological approach?
00:08:10Just looking at what happened,
00:08:13and what they saw was there's a sense, or we now know that this is wrong,
00:08:15but they defined the first six weeks of life as the a social stage.
00:08:20That's to say these infants aren't really social at all. They don't relate to those
00:08:24in their environment, and we'll come back to this in the second.
00:08:27The second stage is where they do relate,
00:08:31but they don't relate specifically to this mother, this father, this grandmother,
00:08:34they simply relate to any adult who will pick them up and who will smile at them.
00:08:40And then the third stage.
00:08:44The specific stage is when the Children, around six months or 6 to 7 months,
00:08:45developed what's known as stranger anxiety.
00:08:51They are beginning to differentiate between their own caregivers, their mothers,
00:08:53their fathers, their grandmothers
00:08:57and people they don't know.
00:08:59And they feel somewhat threatened by people they don't know.
00:09:02And they feel relaxed and safe and at home with those that they do know.
00:09:06And then the final stage, starting around one year,
00:09:1110 months to one year is this idea that
00:09:13actually there isn't just one mother and one father
00:09:16and one grandmother's,
00:09:19a whole group of people whom you can trust and whom you can relate to.
00:09:20So those stages as developed by, uh, Schaefer are pretty accurate.
00:09:25But we now know that the observational methods that were only available in
00:09:31the 19 sixties were somewhat weak compared with what we know now.
00:09:37And we now know that in fact, infants right from the
00:09:44word go almost from the moment of birth.
00:09:48They are actually
00:09:51in a state of relatedness.
00:09:53And I'm sure many of you know this nice study where you stick out your tongue
00:09:54at a newborn infant within the 1st 48
00:10:00hours of life and that infant will start mirroring
00:10:02and sticking his or her tongue back at you.
00:10:05And so, um,
00:10:08although the Schaefer stages of attachment are very
00:10:10useful for thinking about this developmental process,
00:10:14that is our relational history.
00:10:17Um, that's reproduced as it were in our development. Um, the
00:10:21we now think that probably Schaefer was wrong to dub or describe this first six weeks
00:10:28of life as an a social stage because there's a lot of social relating going on,
00:10:36and I'm going to come back to that in
00:10:41some of the latest sections of this presentation.
00:10:43So let's draw this to a close and just say that what John Bell be
00:10:47developed with his colleague Mary Ainsworth was
00:10:52the beginnings of a science of relationships.
00:10:56And that's what we're going to be exploring
00:11:00in the subsequent sections of this presentation,
00:11:02
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Holmes, J. (2021, October 13). Attachment – History, Models and Culture - The History of Attachment Theory [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/attachment-theory/attachment-and-modern-evolutionary-theory
MLA style
Holmes, J. "Attachment – History, Models and Culture – The History of Attachment Theory." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 13 Oct 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/attachment-theory/attachment-and-modern-evolutionary-theory